Children as Authors: Building an Early Foundation for Writing

New York--Last month, the New York City Public Schools instituted a
$250,000 elementary-school writing program in 14 of its 32 community
districts.

The program, which has been tested on a smaller scale over the past
several years in seven New York City districts and in schools from
Massachusetts to New Mexico, is designed to foster in beginning writers
a love for the language and a sense of responsibility for their craft,
according to its author, Lucy McCormick Calkins.

"We know that writing has the power to turn classrooms into richly
literate communities," said Ms. Calkins, who is an assistant professor
of education at Teachers College at Columbia University and a former
student of the writing expert Donald Graves of the University of
Vermont.

"When children view themselves as authors, they feel a new
connection with written language, and they read, write, think, and
speak with authority. Equally important, the workshops provide ongoing
classroom-based support for teachers."

In Ms. Calkins's program, teachers teach writing by means of daily,
hour-long workshops in which students write, rewrite, and edit their
work, much the same way that professional writers do. To learn the
instructional method, 300 teachers from the New York City school system
and from Iowa, Colorado, and as far away as Chile, attended a two-week
institute at Teachers College this summer led by Ms. Calkins.

Earlier Start

Although New York City's high-school seniors are required to pass a
writing-competency test, Shelley Harwayne, a 4th-grade teacher in
Brooklyn's District 15, and Hindy List, the district's curriculum
director, concluded several years ago that more emphasis should be
placed on engaging young students in the process of learning to write
and on building their enthusiasm for the task.

The two educators reviewed the existing research on reading, Ms.
Harwayne explained at the Teachers College institute, and chose Ms.
Calkins's program because it stressed a practical approach to teaching
writing in the early grades.

With funds provided by the city's board of education for testing
innovative programs, Ms. Harwayne and Ms. List hired Ms. Calkins as a
consultant in 1980 and began training interested teachers on a
voluntary basis. (The subsequent $250,000 grant to expand the project
to other districts was provided by the board's division of curriculum
and instruction.)

Program Has 'Caught On'

"I can't think of a program that's caught on like this," said Jack
Isaacs, director of special funds for the New York City Board of
Education.

As students learn to write using Ms. Calkins's program, Mr. Isaacs
said, their reading scores improve, their vocabulary expands, and they
gain confidence. At the same time, teachers become "refreshed and
renewed."

"It's a program that promotes teacher collaboration," Mr. Isaacs
added enthusiastically. "You see teachers at lunch, eating their
sand-wiches and talking about writing."

Ms. Calkins's classroom-writing workshops begin with a 10-minute
mini-lesson, during which the teacher may go over general matters, such
as how to choose or focus on a topic to write about, or how to solve
specific mechanical problems. While the students work, the teacher
moves around the room engaging in individual conferences with pupils
and asking questions designed to help them become more conscious of how
they write. For example, a teacher might ask, "How did you go about
writing?" "What problems did you run into?" or "How do you feel about
this draft?"

Learning To Love To Write

Said Ms. Harwayne: "Children need to write freely first without fear
of making mistakes." Once they learn to love the activity, she added,
the rules will follow.

"Writing an hour a day, the kids learn all the skills," Ms. Harwayne
said. "We have 1st graders using exclamation points correctly."

The next step in Ms. Calkins's program is to have students share
their completed first drafts with other students, who ask questions and
make suggestions for improvement. Final drafts are then edited by
students working with the teacher and are "published."

Even small children can be surprisingly funny or poetic, Ms.
Harwayne said. Sometimes writing gives voice to feelings the children
are not even fully aware of, she added, and they write about the deaths
of grandparents and pets, about the pain of being told they are too old
for birthday parties, or about what it's like to live in an apartment
and visit a friend who lives in a big house.

Reading Involvement

Ms. Calkins, who has worked as both an elementary- and a
secondary-school teacher and who has published a book--Lessons From a
Child--on her research on how rural elementary schoolchildren learn to
write, encouraged conference participants to envision a classrom where
children love to read and want to write, where books and magazines are
eagerly taken up and shared, and where children help and respect each
other as colleagues.

Ms. Calkins described a 6th-grade class in Brooklyn's District 15 in
which Rose Napoli, the teacher, scheduled back-to-back reading and
writing periods for her students.

In the reading group, which used the same methodology as that
outlined for the writing program, Ms. Napoli divided students into
"reading response" groups of four or five. In each group, a book was
discussed based on a question provided by the teacher to encourage
pupils to probe the meaning of the text.

As writers themselves, Ms. Calkins said, the children eagerly talked
about why books begin and end the way they do, what the writer might
have done differently, and how words and phrases were used.

That 6th-grade class, Ms. Calkins said, is a perfect example of a
teacher creating a context for children to get deeply involved in
reading and writing. "Instead of teaching, she helped them to learn,"
she said. "It was nothing less than a miracle."

An Antidote to Burnout

Some teachers who attended the conference pointed out the difficulty
of unlearning years of classroom habits. They said, for example, that
giving up authority over students' writing can be very threatening. But
other participants noted that it can also be enlightening.

Jeanne Socolick, a 4th-grade teacher in Brooklyn's District 15, said
she viewed the writing program as an antidote to burnout. "I wanted
something new, and this gives me something to look forward to," she
said.

Other teachers at the conference said the program had helped them
overcome their own fear of writing.

"When I was growing up, there was no better way to punish me," said
Renee Thornton, another 4th-grade teacher in District 15. "Only the
neatest writers got their papers hung up because writing was a
penmanship lesson. I wrote perfectly grammatical sentences that were
boring. We focus now on what the kids have to say."

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